When it comes to implementing palpable customer service techniques to grow a business, most companies put all or most of their eggs in one basket: customer acquisition. While this is an important strategy that deserves a great deal of focus, it also means that another important aspect of establishing a sustainable business is neglected. In many ways, customer retention is of equal or more value than focusing primarily on customer acquisition. Implementing strong customer retention tactics for your business improves communication, the quality of services, engagement, and overall satisfaction. All of these elements come together to define what’s known as customer lifetime value (CLV).
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What Is Customer Lifetime Value?
In business and specifically marketing, customer lifetime value is the projected overall value of maintaining a strong relationship with your existing customers while still working on acquiring new ones along the way. Learning how to boost profits by increasing CLV is absolutely crucial to the survival and longevity of your business. To do so, you need to conduct thorough market research and find out which aspects of your business are rendering the best results and which ones you should consider foregoing.
Here are a few useful tips to help you maximize CLV for your business:
Provide Excellent Customer Service
As overly simplistic and obvious as this may seem, it’s one of the best pieces of advice anyone can give to a growing business. Focus on the quality of your customer service rather than the quantity of customer acquisition. The former will eventually lead to the latter organically. When you prioritize understanding your customers and providing them with exceptional services and high-quality products, it shows that you care about them on a personal level. And that’s the differentiating factor that motivates and encourages them to continually support your business and perhaps even recommend it to people they know.
Always Ask for Feedback
There’s nothing more empowering and flattering for customers than knowing that you truly care about their experiences with your business as well as their opinions. Asking for feedback proves to your customers that they’re so much more than just a number or means to increasing your bottom line. It shows that you truly care about improving your business practices to suit their needs and that their opinion counts.
Regardless of whether or not you ask for it, customers will always find a way to voice their opinions on various platforms—especially if they had a bad experience. By asking for that feedback after providing a service or product, you’re giving them an opportunity to openly tell you what they think and what types of improvements need to be made so that they’ll continue supporting your business.
Use Effective Up-Selling and Cross-Selling Techniques
Think of every sale as an opportunity to sell more. Using professional customer service platforms as well as artificial intelligence and online marketing techniques, you have the ability to make product and service recommendations to your customers based on their past purchases.
Every time customers view a product or service on your web site without making a purchase, you can use marketing techniques to encourage them to make the purchase. If a customer views a product, then navigates away from the page, send them an e-mail reminder or popup message to complete the order. Sometimes, that’s all the push they need.
During the purchasing process, you can also make product or service recommendations that would go well with the initial purchase as a form of cross-selling.
Use Value-Packed E-Mails to Your Advantage
Most companies grossly misinterpret the meaning of a value-packed e-mailing campaign by sending out what’s essentially considered spam or junk mail to their customers. Sending an endless stream of repetitive, annoying, and long e-mails that don’t really present any of the information your customers are interested in is a colossal mistake on your part.
Instead, send them informative and personalized e-mails that pertain to the specific product or service they purchased from your company and remind them of its benefits. Not only will that keep them interested, but it also provides an invaluable opportunity for up-selling and cross-selling other products or services.
Encourage Customers to Make Subscription-Based Purchases
A huge trend in online marketing right now is to offer products and services on a subscription basis. For instance, if you think that certain customers are more likely to make repeat purchases of the same product or service, then you can offer it to them on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis for a fraction of the cost of purchasing it as a one-off.
A subscription-based business model essentially guarantees that you can offer your customers the best possible personalized service according to their specific needs and preferences. It also gives you an opportunity to leverage more vital information that can help you improve your operations overall.
Be an Industry Disruptor
To differentiate yourself from your competitors, you need to know how to blow your competition completely out of the water. The best way to do this is to familiarize yourself with their business and marketing techniques. Find out how successful they are at obtaining and sustaining brand loyalty. Then offer similar services and products, but with your own personal twist. Add elements that build on the original idea without directly copying it.
Your customers should be completely wowed with your innovations to the extent that you become their go-to service or product provider.
Create a Strong Customer Loyalty Program
Lastly, it’s important to build a positive rapport with your existing customers. Give them a strong incentive to continue supporting your business and choosing it over your competitors.
Many companies have cleverly jumped on the loyalty program bandwagon because it encourages customers to remain loyal to their brands. For instance, many customers collect certain types of points when they shop at specific grocery stores. When they collect enough points, they can then use those points to receive discounts on purchases. Additionally, companies keep track of what their customers are buying based on that point system so that they can offer specifically tailored promotions to each customer.
This is a great way to keep customers engaged and ensure that they’re getting the most out of your services.
3C Contact Services is one of the top customer service call centers in North America. We utilize proven customer lifetime value techniques that are specially designed to create brand loyalty and improve personalized customer relations. To learn more about our outsourced call center services, please feel free to contact us!
